A tip o’ the hat to Brent Ozar who included a link in his 9 Feb 2026 newsletter to the SQLFingers post titled “SQL Server 2016 Ends in July. Here’s What Will Break.“

Regarding SQL Server 2016, SQLFingers says:

After July 14, 2026:

No more security patches
No more support calls
No longer compliant
You can buy Extended Security Updates (ESU) for up to three more years. But ESU only covers critical security patches — no bug fixes, no features, and the cost increases each year. It’s a holding pattern, not a solution.

The real solution is to upgrade. And if you’re planning on 2016 to 2025, you’re about to learn that Microsoft quietly raised the security baseline while we weren’t looking.

Regarding SSIS 2016

A number of my consulting and SSIS Framework clients have already upgraded from SQL Server / SSIS 2016. None of them have upgraded to SQL Server / SSIS 2025. For SSIS users, an important reason may be that the Integration Services Visual Studio Extension for 2022+ isn’t quite finished. I have the utmost confidence in the SSIS Team at Microsoft. they’ll get it sorted soon enough.

The SSIS Catalog Post 2016

For people who… interact… with the SSISDB database – the database that manages the SSIS Catalog – there’s an important change in internal.append_event_message stored procedure for 2017+: @event_message_guid is added as a required output.

We caught this when updating our SSIS Framework for SSIS / SQL Server 2017 because we leverage the existing SSIS Catalog logging, injecting framework messages into the stream so that they’re included in the built-in SSIS Catalog Reports in SSMS.

We crafted a stored procedure in the SSIS Framework to manage passing our messages to the internal.append_event_message stored procedure. Our stored procedure is named custom.addOperationMessage. We added a function named internal.getRelease to parse @@VERSION.

Our SSIS Framework patch code is: